With 'Cyrus,' New Orleans' Duplass brothers aim to prove they can play with Hollywood's big boys

For indie-film fans, it was another Sundance Saturday night in Park City, Utah. As they filed into the venerable Eccles Theatre for the premiere of "Cyrus," it was cold and it was damp, but there was a buzz in the air, the kind that always comes with a world premiere.

Chuck Zlotnick / Fox SearchlightWriter-directors Jay and Mark Duplass -- aka the duplass brothers -- on the set of "Cyrus."

For Mark and Jay Duplass -- the Metairie-raised indie-film darlings who wrote and directed the film, their first studio-backed project -- it was something different entirely. For them, it was emotional torture.

From the writing, to the shooting to the editing, all the real work already had been done on "Cyrus," a dramatic comedy starring John C. Reilly, Jonah Hill and Marisa Tomei and backed by Fox Searchlight. But now came the hard part: giving their baby over to audiences -- and seeing if their leap from the art house to the multiplex would fly.

"You've got confidence in what you've made as much as you can," Mark Duplass said, recalling that Sundance Film Festival debut back in January. "But that first moment where you're in the theater releasing it into the world, you're like, 'Are they just going to rip us apart and call us sellouts because we made this bigger-budget movie?' "

Finally, the lights dimmed. The sound went up, and ...

"Oh, my God!" Jay said, flashing back to the moment.

"It becomes a visceral experience at that point," Mark continued. "You just start sweating and sweating until the (first) laugh comes, and when the laugh comes, you just start crying."

"It was like we connected eyes," Jay said, "and we did sort of psychic high-fives: 'They liked it!' "

Jay Duplass, left, with actor Jonah Hill and Mark Duplass on the set of 'Cyrus.'

"Almost all screenings other than this one are now low-pressure, just because I have a litmus test," he said about an hour before the Prytania screening. "I kind of know how it's going to go in general. But there's something different about New Orleans, not just because it's my hometown and because all these people from my past are going to be here watching it, but just in general, I almost see New Orleans as its own world. ... It's almost as if I was taking this film to a foreign country. I really have no idea how it's going to play."

Coming after their 2005 debut, "The Puffy Chair," and 2008's "Baghead," "Cyrus" is the Duplasses' third film. In a lot of ways, it also is their most important, a test to see if their unique, convention-breaking filmmaking style -- dubbed "mumblecore" by the film community, a label the Duplasses greet with a shrug of indifference -- can work with big-name actors in the cast, with studio suits holding the purse strings and with mainstream audiences in the seats.

In a nutshell, the Duplasses' "low-fi" approach to filmmaking is built largely around intentionally imperfect camera work intended to achieve an enhanced level of realism and a generally laid-back vibe both on camera and off. Unlike some directors, they welcome improvisation from their actors.

"Sometimes we end up getting really close to the script," Mark said back in May in an interview at the brothers' New Orleans production offices for the Paramount-backed "Jeff Who Lives at Home," which they currently are editing. "It's like telling a kid he can run away from home -- and then he goes to his bedroom. (Actors) like to be nestled in what's there. But sometimes we'll find something brilliant in the moment."

"But we don't really improvise for comedy," Jay said, seamlessly picking up his brother's thought, as is their habit. "We're not like Judd Apatow, where we go, 'Make a joke! Be funny!' ... It's literally, like, 'You know what you need to get done in this scene. You need to tell him this piece of information.' "

Mark continued: " 'If you don't like the way we've written it here, say it in the way that'll be most comfortable for you. Because ultimately, that'll be better for everybody.' "

Jonah Hill, left, Marisa Tomei and John C. Reilly, in a scene from 'Cyrus.'

Jay: "Or, 'You want to leave and this person is not going to let you leave. So do whatever it takes. Use the lines, but if that's not working ...

Mark: "Use a bat."

In "Cyrus," one of the first laugh lines -- one of those the brothers use as a gauge of their audience's acceptance of the movie -- is just such an improvised moment, a jock-itch joke that Reilly came up with.

Wednesday night, the Prytania audience laughed right on cue, a sign that the Duplass method -- which the brothers have been adamant about preserving, despite studio involvement -- very well might be ready for the mainstream.

"Our strategy literally was, 'Let's make one of our movies. Let's do it as much of the way as we did it before, and let's just (put) famous people in it,' " Jay said. "And, fingers, crossed, we hope that the way we tell stories and the story we want to tell will reach a much greater audience."